AZ-900 Describe Azure architecture and services Practice Question
Which Azure service provides a content delivery network (CDN) that caches static content at edge locations worldwide to reduce latency for users?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Front Door with Azure CDN because both offer edge caching and global presence, but Front Door is primarily a global load balancer with advanced routing and WAF capabilities, while Azure CDN is the dedicated service for static content caching and delivery.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Azure CDN
Azure CDN is the correct answer because it is specifically designed as a content delivery network that caches static content (such as images, CSS, JavaScript files) at edge locations worldwide. By distributing cached copies closer to users, it reduces latency and offloads origin server traffic. Azure Front Door also uses edge caching but is primarily a global load balancer and application delivery controller, not a dedicated CDN service.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Front Door
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global application delivery and load balancing service that does include content caching from edge nodes as one of its integrated features, along with SSL offload, WAF, URL-based routing, and session affinity to accelerate whole applications. However, it is a broader, multi-tenant reverse proxy and global routing service designed to manage API, microservices, and application traffic, not a dedicated CDN service optimized solely for static asset delivery at the edge. Because the question specifically asks for the service that 'caches static content at global edge locations' in the most direct sense, Front Door, while overlapping with CDN, is not the correct answer when Azure CDN exists with that singular focus.
- ✓
Azure CDN
Why this is correct
Azure CDN is Microsoft's dedicated content delivery network that replicates and caches static assets such as images, CSS, JavaScript, and videos at strategically located point-of-presence servers worldwide. When a user requests such content, the CDN serves it from the nearest edge node rather than the origin server, dramatically reducing latency, bandwidth use, and origin load. Its global edge caching capability is precisely designed for this purpose and is the service most directly matching the question's definition.
- ✗
Azure Traffic Manager
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS level, not the HTTP/HTTPS content layer, and is used to route incoming traffic across global regions to ensure high availability and responsive performance. It employs routing policies like priority, weighted, performance, geographic, or subnet to decide which regional endpoint should resolve for a given request, but it never stores or caches any actual file content at an edge location. Therefore, it cannot guarantee that static content is materially delivered closer to the end user, making it the wrong choice for a dedicated caching service.
- ✗
Azure Application Gateway
Why it's wrong here
Azure Application Gateway is a region-scoped, layer-7 load balancer that handles HTTP/HTTPS traffic within a single virtual network, offering features like cookie-based session affinity, TLS termination, URL path-based routing, and a Web Application Firewall. It can be configured with a back-end pool across multiple servers or even across availability zones, but its caching capabilities are only part of a broader reverse proxy role and are confined to a regional deployment, not a global edge network. It does not deliver cached content from distributed global locations, so it fails the requirement for global edge caching.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-900 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-900 exam.